The control of bleeding during surgery accounts for a major portion of the total time involved in an operation. The bleeding that occurs from the plethora of small blood vessels that pervade all tissues whenever tissues are incised obscures the surgeon's vision, reduces his precision, and often dictates slow and elaborate procedures in surgical operations. It is well known to heat the tissues to minimize bleeding from incisions, and surgical scalpels which are designed to elevate tissue temperatures and minimize bleeding are also well known. One such scalpel transmits high frequency, high energy sparks from a small electrode held in the surgeon's hand to the tissues, where they are converted to heat. Typically, substantial electrical currents pass through the patient's body to a large electrode beneath the patient, which completes the electrical circuit. Discharge of sparks and temperature conversion in the tissue are poorly controlled in distribution and intensity, and erratic muscular contractions in the patient are produced so that this apparatus cannot be used to perform precise surgery. Further, apparatus of this type frequently produce severe tissue damage and debris in the form of charred and dead tissue, which materially interfere with wound healing.
Another well-known surgical scalpel employs a blade with a resistive heating element which cuts the tissue and provides simultaneous hemostasis. Although these resistive elements can be readily brought to a suitably high and constant temperature in air prior to contacting tissues, as soon as portions of the blade come in contact with tissues, they are rapidly cooled. During surgery, non-predictable and continuously varying portions of the blade contact the tissues as they are being cut. As the blade cools, the tissue cutting and hemostasis become markedly less effective and tissue tends to adhere to the blade. If additional power is applied by conventional means to counteract this cooling, this additional power is selectively delivered to the uncooled portions of the blade, frequently resulting in excessive temperatures which may result in tissue damage and blade descruction. This results from the fact that in certain known resistively heated scalpels, the heating is a function of the current squared times the resistance (I.sup.2 R). In conventional metallic blades of this type, the higher the temperature of any blade portion, the greater its electrical resistance, and consequently the greater the incremental heating resulting from incremental power input.
It is generally recognized that to seal tissues and effect hemostasis it is desirable to operate at a temperature between 300.degree. C. and 1000.degree. C. And for reasons noted above, it is desirable that electrothermal hemostatic surgical cutting instruments include a mechanism by which power is selectively delivered to those portions of the blade that are cooled by tissue contact so that the cutting edge may be maintained at a substantially uniform operating temperature within the desired optimal range. Recently, hemostatic scalpels have been described (see, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,768,482 and 3,826,263) in which the temperature-controlling mechanisms include resistive heating elements disposed on the surface of the scalpel blade. However, such instruments require precision in fabricating the dimensions of the heating elements to obtain the desired resistances. And such resistive heating elements may be subjected to variations in resistance during use, as tissue juices and proteins become deposited upon the surface of the blade.